For seven years from 2012 to 2018 the monthly payroll employment showed a solid trend of around 200,000 gains each and every month.  If it was much above or below this trend, analysts found some excuse to explain the difference and expected the off-trend observation to be quickly reversed.  So far this year most analysts continued to act as if this pattern was being repeated.

However, in August the Bureau of labor Statistics (BLS) rebenchmarked the data to more recent Census data. They announced that it would lower reported employment growth but they did not release the revised data until the August employment report last Friday.  The new data shows that 2019 payroll employment was significantly weaker than originally reported. The January monthly increase was still around the old 200,000 trend.  But in the seven months from February, 2019 to August,2019 the average monthly gain was only 123,000, roughly 60% of the old trend. Moreover, the 12 month moving average fell from 225,000 in January to 165,000 in August and every observation from February to August was below the still declining  12 month moving average.

Seven consecutive months should be enough to clearly demonstrate that trend payroll employment growth has fallen to a new, significantly lower trend than the old 200,000 trend.

Figure 1

Analysts tend to focus on the month over month change so it was understandable that they did not notice that the revised data was showing much more weakness than the old data. Remember,guessing monthly economic releases was a game created by the brokerage house, especially the bond houses, to generate volume because their earnings was much more sensitive to volume changes than other variables.

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by New Deal democrat

Weekly Indicators for September 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.

The nowcast and the long term forecast have been pretty stable, but the short term forecast has been volatile recently – and the monthly series (slightly negative) vs. the weekly data (more positive) are not in sync.

This is likely because there is much more monthly data (usually from the government) than weekly data (more often from private sources) about manufacturing.

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Is Doing Environmental Economics Especially Depressing?

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August jobs report: for once, the underwhelming headline masked very good internals

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by Joseph Joyce

Is Inflation a Global Phenomenon?

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Two sharply contrasting reports on the economy to start September

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Figure 1

Via mashable:

Alaska’s exceptional summer continues.

The most rapidly changing state in the U.S. has no sea ice within some 150 miles of its shores, according to high-resolution sea ice analysis from the National Weather Service. The big picture is clear: After an Arctic summer with well above-average temperatures, warmer seas, and a historic July heat wave, sea ice has vanished in Alaskan waters.

“Alaska waters are ice free,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.

“This is definitely an extreme year — even by more recent standards in a changed Arctic,” noted Walt Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In the continually warming Arctic, sea ice has completely melted around the Alaskan coast before, notably during 2017’s melt season, but never this early. “It’s cleared earlier than it has in any other year,” said Thoman. (Sea ice starts regrowing again in the fall, when temperatures drop.)

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Voters who are paying a lot of attention to the race are much more to support Elisabeth Warren than voters who are paying little or no attention. It is also true that voters who are paying a lot of attention are more likely to support Joe Biden than Elisabeth Warren. Finally, Voters who are paying a lot of attention are somewhat less likely to support Bernie Sanders than are voters who are paying little or none.

If you don’t see an image cut and pasted from Quinnipiac click on the “Read More >” link at the bottom right corner of the post to see the image of the polling results.

The whole pdf report of the results is here

6% of people who are paying little or no attention support Warren and 25% of people who are paying a lot of attention support Warren. In contrast the numbers are almost identical for Biden who has 31% among those paying little or no attention and 32% support among those paying a lot of attention. Finally Sanders has 18 % support among those paying little or no attention and 11% support among those paying a lot of attention.

I think this is interesting. For one thing, people pay increasing attention as time passes. This helps explain the striking increase in overall support for Warren. I would tend to suspect that support for Warren will continue to increase.

But it might just show that nerds like nerds, that people who claim they have paid a lot of attention like the candidate who always has a plan for that. If this explains the pattern, there is less reason to forecast continued increase of support for Warren. People pay more attention to elections as the voting day approaches, but non nerds do not become nerds.

Anyway, I thought the polling data is interesting.

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Does O’Rourke Have The Trade Strategy For Dems Against Trump?

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